Blue Moon Pizza manager Ryan Goldhammer shows off a stuffed pizza made at the new location at 190 California Ave. in downtown Reno. / Provided to the Reno Gazette-Journal

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Through big picture windows, Blue Moon Gourmet Pizza on California Avenue looks out onto a burgeoning restaurant hub stretching from the Cheese Board & Wine Seller to Peg's Glorified Ham & Eggs. You can also see the flat, black back of the Nevada Museum of Art. These views, however, will not distract you from the delicious pizza and other dishes Blue Moon is serving.

My family and I came out of the snow Monday night to try this Blue Moon, after eating once or twice at its sister restaurant on Lakeside Drive. The place has a clean, refined look, and the fine windows let us stare at the sporadic snowfall. Our server went out of her way to bring me a drink as I waited for my wife and daughters, and she was attentive throughout the meal, even during the standard wait for baking pizza. I imagine the place is more crowded during lunch (or when it's not snowing), but we appreciated being more or less by ourselves.

Blue Moon offers a wide variety of pizzas, including Greek Classic with feta cheese; Yale's Thai with hoisin sauce; and Big Apple Style with Italian sausage and shrimp. Submarines and veggie calzones also are on the menu, as well as antipasto and Greek salads.

The first specialty pizza I noted on the menu was the Tahoe Ranch, which eschews tomato sauce. Instead, it features ranch dressing, mozzarella cheese, cheese blend, bacon bits, red onions, chicken and fresh tomatoes. As much as I love traditional pizza, this pie sounded good to me, and I thought my middle daughter, a celebrated picky eater, might enjoy it (she dislikes tomato sauce and ketchup -- switched at birth, perhaps?). So when my family arrived, I talked them into getting a large Tahoe Ranch along with a medium cheese pizza (with tomato sauce). I ordered a sausage calzone with onions, cheese and sun-dried tomatoes, and my wife ordered cheese bread and a salad.

First, the bad news. Picky eater middle-child didn't like her pizza in its entirety; she seemed to have eaten the cheese and picked off the bacon and tomatoes. Sigh. But the rest of us thoroughly enjoyed our pizzas. The Tahoe Ranch featured what I like in a nonNew York pizza: crisp, well-cooked chicken; a strong but not overpowering presence of garlic; and tomatoes to provide a flavorful contrast to the cheese and the crust. The cheese pizza was very good as well, although I still slightly prefer the crust at Blind Onion. And the calzone? It was huge, and the crust was a tad overcooked, but the sausage mixture inside was extremely pleasing -- again, spicy but not too spicy. It was so good, I abandoned plans to take some of it home and finished it there. Our tab came in above $50, but we took the equivalent of an entire pizza home to eat warmed up the next night.

With so many other restaurant choices in the area, you may miss Blue Moon. But it can stand on its own, and because it's convenient to the museum and a lot of offices, you can walk there when you're at work or at play. While you wait for your pizza, be sure to take in the views or, if you're lucky, watch the snow.